The
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) is a basic research laboratory
under the Council of Scientific of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR),
Ministry of Science and Technology, Govt. of India. It was set up in the
year 1977. CCMB is devoted to the frontier research in modern biology.
It has been recognized as one of the member institutions of UNESCO's Global
Network of Molecular and Cell Biology.

It
has also been recognized as a South Centre of Excellence in Research and
Training of the Third World Academy of Sciences, Trieste, Italy. Some of
the research activities of the host institute are in the areas of Tumor
biology, cataract and other eye diseases, molecular chaperons, protein
structures and functions, viral hepatitis, DNA fingerprinting, transgenics
and aquaculture, applied processes and products, molecular basis of sex
determination, osmoregulation and microbial genetics, extremophiles,
sequence analysis of nucleic acids and proteins, mathematical modelling
of metabolic processes, mechanism of action of hormones, proteins of the
female reproductive tract, molecular basis of development, signal transduction,
transcription, host-guest interaction in plants, biotic and abiotic stresses
in the plants, enzyme structure and function, intracellular transport of
proteins, nuclear pores and lamins, membrane active molecules and membrane
organization.

The
Bioinformatics Centre at CCMB was started in 1986. The principal objective
is to serve as part of a national network providing biological information
with a stress on Oncogenes, Reproductive Physiology, Cell Transformation,
Nucleic Acid and Protein Sequences. Since its inception, the centre has
strived to achieve its objectives in a variety of ways. The centre is subscribing
databases like EMBL, SWISSPROT, PDB and MEDLINE and making them available
to users. These databases are updated regularly. The centre is well equipped
with state-of-the-art computers and communication infrastructure comprising
VSAT, DEC-Alpha Server, MicroVAX-II and several Pcs. INTERNET access facility
is available at BIC. Silicon graphics workstation with Biosym software
provides high speed high resolution graphics facility to the scientists.
Several research journals are available online for users at the centre.

All
the systems in the centre are linked by ethernet and the facility has been
extended to provide access to the centre's resources on about 60 personal
computers in the institute. CCMB is one of the centres under the National
Facility for High Resolution Graphics and Molecular Modelling. The INTERNET
service is being used by all the CCMB and CDFD scientific staff for browsing
scientific journals like JBC, Science, Nature, Cell and several other journals.
INTERNET is also helping scientists for online submission of sequences
and analysis of nucleotide and protein sequences and getting valuable information
from other universities and laboratories all over the world.

The
centre has contributed in the development of Graphic plotting the alpha-carbon
backbone chain of protein for visualising the secondary structure of the
protein molecule given the 3D coordinates of the constituent atoms; programme
simulating a back propagating type artificial neural network model to be
used for prediction; Statistical analysis of data obtained by searching
protein sequence database for entries having disulphides, cysteine and
proline residues. With the help of High Resolution Graphics facility, few
softwares for Pcs were also developed by the centre. The centre also undertakes
R&D in bioinformatics. Some of these are: Analysis and structure prediction
of proteins and nucleic acid sequences; A programme to suggest substitution
point mutations to engineer intracellular protein stability; Energy minimisation
studies; Study of ribonuclease; Receptor binding study, linear and non-linear
demand for biochemical reaction; Correlation between N-terminal amino acids
and its radius of gyration; and Modelling alpha-crystallin, a molecular
chaperon.